You can see the beach again along Great Highway. Seventh Street, under Interstate 280, no longer looks like a Mad Max version of RV World. In the Bayview, RV owners have stopped using the streets as their long-term storage solution.

In other words, the controversial pilot program to limit oversize vehicles from parking in specific areas of the city is working - and so well that it may be enlarged and extended.

But it's taken years to get to this point and see these results.

Two years ago, then-Supervisor Carmen Chu began taking about an ordinance that would ban the cluster of campers, trucks and recreational vehicles that jammed the parking spaces along Ocean Beach, she ran into a familiar backlash.

It wasn't a parking issue, advocates for the homeless said, it was a case of criminalizing the "vehicularly homeless." The strident opposition made it seem that restrictions would never pass.

But in 2011, a Municipal Transportation Agency survey found otherwise. A check of 208 of the vehicles that had verifiable registration revealed that 60 percent were registered to San Francisco addresses. The survey found most of those vehicles were in the Sunset, Bayview and Tenderloin/South of Market, represented by Supervisors Chu, Malia Cohen, and Jane Kim.

So it wasn't primarily homeless people living out of their cars, but residents who were storing their vehicles on the street for free.

"They found art cars from Burners (Burning Man devotees)," said Cohen, "and people from Bernal Heights who would just park their RVs and go on their merry way. These were people reinforcing the idea of my district as a dumping ground for San Francisco."

Cohen teamed up with Chu (and later Katy Tang, the Chu aide who replaced her when Chu became assessor) to support an ordinance that makes it illegal to park oversize vehicles overnight in designated areas.

It passed the Board of Supervisors 7-4 last September, although Kim, who did not return a call for comment, voted against it.

The resulting transformation at Ocean Beach, says Tang, has been remarkable.

"The Great Highway is clear," she said. "Before, you would drive down there and see 12 to 15 (campers) lined up. Lincoln (next to Golden Gate Park) was the same. It's been amazing."

The ban has also helped make some neighborhoods safer.

"We had folks dumping their black-water tanks into the storm drains in the middle of the night," said Ocean Beach resident John Zwolinski, whose neighborhood watch group documented plenty of questionable behavior.

"Solicitation, aggressive dogs, aggressive panhandling, needles, trash and feces outside the vehicles, folks setting their RVs and neighboring vehicles on fire, and folks buying and selling drugs" were reported by several members of the neighborhood watch group, Zwolinski said.

The MTA is supposed to collect data this month about how the pilot program has worked. In November, a recommendation will be issued to the MTA board and the Board of Supervisors to "modify the program as appropriate and continue roll out."

Cohen's office is already hearing from neighborhoods who want the ban extended to their streets. Tang's constituents are definitely on board.

If the ban is extended, that would certainly mean a hue and cry from the Homeless Coalition (calls to them were not returned), but the results are hard to dispute.

"Bottom line is that the oversize vehicle legislation garnered enough support to pass in spite of the vehement opposition" of the Homeless Coalition, Zwolinski said. "That suggests that a lot of people throughout the city recognized that long rows of big vehicles permanently parked alongside city streets wasn't working."